Dead And Buried is a horror film directed by Gary Sherman from 1981, there was quite a bit of behind the scenes interference which resulted in more gore being added to the film and plotlines changing on a continual basis, i'm all for a bit more gore and especially in eighties horror productions which were often cut to achieve an R rating in America, but some of the effects work just doesn't work as good as it could, one instance of a very bad effect is a face melting scene, originally Stan Winston was going to work on that scene but he was no longer available so a new FX team came in and were instructed to make the scene work with no camera cutaway, just one seamless shot, unfortunately the effect doesn't work and looks poor, thats a shame as it's the only really poor effects shot in the film. View a shot of that scene in screencap 17 below.

The film trailers played on the fact that the writers of Alien, Ronald Shusett and Dan O' Bannon, wrote the screenplay, i feel this was a mistake as it leads people to believe they may be getting a similiar experience to that film and Dead And Buried is nothing like Alien. I enjoyed the film but then i'm a horror film fan, i think some parts of the movie work better than other parts, some scenes could have been more effective and creepy and i believe a better director would have achieved more with the ever changing script.

As far as image quality goes well i do believe it resembles the original filmed look, don't expect great visuals though, it's a grainy film which is to be expected for a low budget horror film from 1981 with lots of night photography, i actually liked the look though, i just don't have a problem with film grain, there is more detail than the old DVD edition, that version struggled with the film grain and as a result contained a lot of image artifacts, this release from Blue Underground handles the film grain well and looks more like a film print would, no it's not perfect, i believe any issues though are with the original photography and filmstock used. I'm happy with the work Blue Underground put into this release.

Film grain in still images occasionally give the wrong impression, this is just one frame from 24fps, in motion the film looks better than the captures below.

The sound mix is a different matter, i wish Blue Underground and other distributors would give us the option of the untampered original soundtrack, unfortunately it's more common to get a remix, nothing particularly ugly about the remix on this disc and in places it even has some decent surround sound but they should have included the original mono track, i feel it's a waste of space to include two lossless tracks, one is DTS HD Master Audio 7.1 and the other is Dolby True HD 7.1, there is also a Dolby Digital 5.1 EX track, now that might look impressive on the back cover but truly they should just have included one lossless track.

While not quite entering the realm of classic horror movie territory, i still believe it has some good effective moments and is at least worth a rental, oh and i must mention the brilliant artwork on the blu ray cover, this artwork was also used back in 1981 to promote the film. The disc is region free.

View blu ray screencaps of Dead And Buried below. Click twice for the full hd image.